This
conference will be centred on the way North American minority and
exilic literatures problematize such generally received notions as home
and
belonging. Often localised on an anxious border between an originary,
imaginary
"homeland" — only recuperated through myth and storytelling — and the
lived present, caught between here and there, departure and arrival,
such
literatures readily generate themes and tropes of nostalgia and the
in-between:
an "insider-outsider" status caught between community affiliations of
origin and the social and cultural space of the adopted nation.

Yet at
the same time "minoritized literatures remind us that
nations are made, not born, and are thus open to refashioning" (Cho,
2007)
suggesting that the "insider-outsider" both confirms and calls into
question the norms and values that construct national unities. Do
minority and
exilic literatures therefore contribute to a dynamic political
imaginary,
envisaging alternative modes and discourses of citizenship? Can they
contribute
to reconceptualising the notions of home and nationhood and to
challenging
fixed assumptions of authentic origins?

In
this case what strategies - patterns, themes, metaphors, images -
serve to reflect on and reshape the network of relations tying the
individual
to the community? How does textual, representative space deflect or
reflect the
political and ideological?

The Bering Straight theory has been long discounted as a
way of
imagining the presence of Indigenous peoples on North American soil
precisely
because it denies Indigenous primacy and locates the First Peoples as,
instead,
a kind of Asian. A few novels from the latter half of the 20th
century, however, have offered possibilities for kinship that can be
constructed through the modes of perceptionby
which
some
Asians and some Indigenous peoples seem to
look alike.Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, posits a kind of “nature” in
this similarity of appearance, which causes the main character, Tayo,
to
perceive a fallen Japanese soldier on the WWII battlefield in Malaysia
as his
uncle. For Marie Clements in Burning
Vision “the look of like” emerges as a kind of kinship that is
natural only
after the fact of the (technologized and enculturated) atomic blast
which
rearranges both space and time, and places Asian and Indigenous
characters in
close proximity to one another through shared grief. For Ruth Ozeki in All Over Creation, there is kind of
racial elision that occurs in the potato farming town of Idaho Falls,
such that
the mixed-race Japanese American character Yumi Fuller is chosen to
play the
“Indian Princess” figure in the grade school’s yearly Thanksgiving
pageant,
favoured over any one of a number of Shoshone girls who attend the
school.
Embroiled in all three of these scenarios is the fact that Asian North
American
struggles for rights within the bounds of the settler state necessarily
re-inforce the power of that state, and run counter to Indigenous
interests
that challenge the ethics and legality of the settler state to begin
with. On the
other hand, what Indigenous Peoples and Asian North Americans (at their
most
progressive) share is an anti-colonial struggle. This paper examines
the
possibilities for an ethics or poetics of relation between First
Nations
Peoples and Asian North Americans in the contemporary moment given the
fraughtness of partially shared interests on the one hand, and “the
look of like”
on the other. I argue that the idea of nature is both necessary to the
construction of this ethics, but that in its articulation the idea of
nature
becomes deeply cultural.

Keynote speaker - Deborah Madsen, University of Geneva

The Rhetoric of Double Allegiance: Imagined
Communities in North American Diasporic Chinese Literatures

The most popular works of Chinese North American
literature can be
read as structurally centered upon a logic of the 'neither/nor': texts
exemplified by the work of Amy Tan that display allegiance to neither
America
(the 'hostland') nor to China (the 'homeland'). Rather than a doubling
of
allegiance, through a positive rhetoric of 'both/and' national
belonging, texts
within this canon display a double negative, described by Sheng-Mei Ma
as 'the
deathly embrace' of Orientalism. This logic betrays the residual power
of
racialized nationalism, in the contexts of hyphenated identities and
diasporic
community formation. In Canada, Wayson Choy’s novel The
Jade Peony and his memoire Paper
Shadows, SKY Lee's Disappearing Moon
Café,and Denise Chong’s family
history The Concubine’s Children, for
example, highlight the capacity of canonical literary forms to
crystallize
certain images of 'overseas Chinese communities,' their relations with
the
'homeland' and allegiances to the 'hostland' or the resident
nation-state. Even
the terminology used to describe the transnational formation of these
communities is ambivalent, articulating in such terms as 'home' and
'host' a
rhetoric of sojourn that denies the immigrant a sense of belonging at
the same
time as it instantiates a power relationship between the established
culture
and that of newcomers. Immigrants are placed in a position of
'belonging' not
to the new culture of arrival but to the already non-existent culture
of
departure. In contrast to the pernicious
influence of this
nationalistic 'neither here nor there' rhetoric, Fred Wah's poetry and
Larissa
Lai's fiction engage a local-global dynamism through a 'both/and'
paradigm for
diasporic identity. Like Shirley Lim in the US, these writers explore,
complicate, and critique in productive ways the rhetorical
dynamics of
Orientalism/Occidentalism that are shaped in the transnational context
of
shifting Sino-American relations.

Hans Bak, Radboud University Nijmegen

Flights to Canada: Jacob Lawrence, Ishmael Reed and
Lawrence Hill

“Canada,
like
freedom,
is
a state of mind” (Ishmael Reed)

In my paper I will compare and contrast the visual and
literary
representations of Canada as the imagined utopia at the end of the
exilic,
diasporic experience of the flight from slavery in the works of three
contemporary North-American artists: (a) Harriet
and the Promised Land (1967), a narrative series of paintings by
African-American artist Jacob Lawrence, intended as a tribute,
conceived in the
spirit of the Civil Rights movement, to the life and work of Harriet
Tubman and
her efforts to help runway slaves escape to “the promised land” of
Canada; (b) Flight to Canada (1976), a quirky and
ironic postmodern exploration of Canada as a space of otherness
(heterotopia)
through a revisiting of the historical genre of the slave narrative by
African-American novelist Ishmael Reed; and (c) The Book
of Negroes (2007) by Canadian author Lawrence Hill, the
much laurelledaccount of the
exilic passage from Africa to North Carolina to Nova Scotia (and back
to
Africa) of the female slave Aminata Diallo. Focusing on the
representation of
the “flight to Canada” motif I will explore the tensions between
(nostalgia
for) an originary homeland (Africa, the American South) and an
“imagined
community” in exile (Canada).In
the light of the conference theme, I propose to read the three texts –
one visual,
two literary; two American, one Canadian – as an intertextual triptych
of
different but interrelated modes of revisiting the history of slavery
and
revising the motifs of exile and return, diaspora and homecoming.

Pilar Cuder-Domínguez, University of Huelva

The Psychology of Immigration: Map-making and
Map-breaking in Nalini Warriar’s The
Enemy Within (2005)

For
Malashri
Lal
(“Politics
of Self-Definition: Mapping Asian-Indians in Canada” 2000:
55),
immigrants may be seen as undertaking a process of psychological mapbreaking (i.e.,a
positive act by the immigrant as s/he
leaves the homeland and chooses to journey towards claiming a new space
of the
map of another country) as well as being engaged in a process of mapmaking (i.e., a drawing of personal,
social, political parameters within which to function within an
unfamiliar and
often hostile environment). This paper attempts to read Nalini
Warriar’s first
novel, The Enemy Within (2005) under
the light of Lal’s definition of these internal processes.

Warriar, born in India, published her first
collection of short stories, Blues from
the Malabar Coast, in 2002, thus joining a new generation of South
Asian
Canadian women writers after the major success in fiction of the 1990s
generation, made up of writers such as Shani Mootoo, Shauna Singh
Baldwin,
Anita Rau Badami, and Shree Ghatage. Warriar’s The Enemy
Withinis
set in Quebec City between 1971 and 1997 and it tells the story of Sita
as her
marriage is arranged to Anup when she is seventeen. She then leaves
Kerala for
Canada and, like Rama’s wife, she tries to be the perfect wife while
experiencing the bitterness of exile. Lal’s approach to the psychology
of
immigration proves very helpful to understand the construction of a
character
for whom mapmaking involves facing a double oppression, as a woman and
as an
immigrant, within her marriage and in an alien nation. Particularly
interesting
is Warriar’s skilful deployment of Quebec nationalist politics as a
sounding
board for Sita’s plight, since her story spans from the 1970s to the
late
1990s. Allusions to Quebec politics and to the racist underside to
nationalism
pepper the novel and frame the exploration of the gender and nation
dichotomy.

Michel Feith,
Université de Nantes

Intertextual
Homelands in Two Southwestern Novels by Louis Owens

Nightland
(1996) and Dark River (1999) by Louis
Owens share so many common features that they read like variations on
the same
pattern or, more precisely, a set of themes and its ironic
augmentation. Both
are simultaneously Native and exilic American writing, mix the thriller
with
magic realism, and ultimately seem to have no qualms about inscribing
predominantly oral cultures on the printed page.

At first reading, both novels seem
to belong to the genre of the Southwestern Indian thriller, inspired by
Tony
Hillerman. This could be an ideal situation for an “anthropological”
novel, in
which the mystery can serve as a ploy to impart knowledge about the
tribal
culture at hand. The problem is that Jacob Nashoba, the protagonist of Dark River, is a displaced Choctaw
Vietnam veteran who, although married into the reservation, never gets
to fully
understand or be integrated into its culture. Similarly, the main
characters of
Nightland are independent Cherokee ranchers,
out of touch with Pueblo culture. Both native and non-native, insiders
and
outsiders, these atypical Indians are marginal within communities which
are
themselves marginal(ized) in the United States. This liminal position
can be
said to serve several aims: it allows to explore the potentialities and
limitations of pan-tribal visions, while drawing attention to the
multiple ways
of being “Native American”; it also gives the author more freedom in
dealing
with native identities and imagination.

This, together with the
mixed-blood identities of these three characters, remind us of Gerald
Vizenor’s
distinction between the “invented” Indians in the white mind and the
“imagined”
nature of Native identities. One of the key components in this creative
fashioning
of self and community is an intimate relation with tribal land and the
myths
and stories embodied in it. Surrounded by autochtonous Pueblo Indians,
the
“diasporic” protagonists have a different, elective relation with the
land,
both similar and dissimilar to that of the Whites. Mythic patterns and
entities
– like Spider Woman or Corn Woman – still influence the character’s
destinies,
and the invisible world shuttles in and out of this one: in both
novels, the
ghosts of the recently dead appear and, contrary to traditional views,
become
helpers rather than hostile forces. As a matter of fact, traditions are
flexible: in Dark River, dead
Jessie’s facetious ghost appears to Indians and whites alike. Even the
shamanic
figures, “Grampa Siquani” in Nightland
and old Mrs Edwards in Dark River,
the living memory of the tribe, have to improvise in unexpected
situations.
After all, renewal and adaptation is part of tradition too.

Part of this process of adaptation
is the conversion of a predominantly oral culture into a written one.
Native
American novelists often see themselves as mediators between tribal
orality and
Western literacy, yet tend to privilege orality “ontologically” and
formally in
their works, as a landmark of authenticity. But there is at present a
long
tradition of Native American literature in writing and, in the wake of
authors
and critics like Gerald Vizenor, an obvious influence on Owens,
textuality has
also been given pride of place. Between Nightland
and Dark River, the importance of,
and reflection on, the medium of writing has increased dramatically.
The choice
of the thriller as the frame of both novels may have aimed at
readability for a
general audience; it is also part of the myths of contemporary popular
culture,
both in writing and in motion pictures, and therefore particularly
well-adapted
to a “comparative” inclusion of tribal myths. Its main focus being
violence and
evil, it could remind us both of the violent history of the Southwest –
in Dark River, a bunch of Right-Wing
militiamen play cowboys and Indians on the reservation – and of the
different
attitudes to evil in Native and Euro-American cultures. But the
thriller and
detective novel are realistic genres, normally impervious to the
supernatural:
the magic realist elements of the plots therefore amount to a violation
of
their codes, an infusion of generic hybridity reminiscent of
Postmodernism.

These antagonistic representations
of Native cultures foreground the question of authenticity. In Dark River, university-educated tribal
officials sell kitschy images of Indians to whites, while the resident
anthropologist, Golberg / Gold Bird, becomes more native than the
natives.
Parodying Vizenor’s own parodies of anthropologists, Owens shows in the
comic
mode the complexity of these issues: while making fun of the
museographic
vision of Indians held by many whites, including scientists, who equate
authenticity with stagnation, he recognizes that by setting down in
writing
traditional myths and practices, anthropologists have also prolonged
the oral
memory of the tribes and preserved knowledge that would have otherwise
been
lost.

But
the most self-conscious gesture is his
revisiting of the “canon” of Native American literature, his
acknowledgment of
the existence of a literary tradition removed from the sources of oral
“authenticity”. Nightland is an
all-Indian thriller, in which both good guys and bad guys (and dolls)
are
Indian. The baddies are a pueblo tribal gang who see drug trafficking
as a
retribution visited on the whites for their killing and dispossession
of the
Natives. This is what villains in American popular culture would do,
but it
seems contrary to Indian spirituality, as expressed in such novels as
N. Scott
Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968),
and especially Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony
(1977), both situated in the Southwest. In the latter, Tayo, a
World War
veteran, resists his desire for revenge in order not to engulf the
world in
evil and witchcraft, and performs a healing ceremony instead. In
Owens’s novel,
it is Siquani who performs a ceremony to lay the ghost of a murdered
man to
rest, thereby revitalizing a land afflicted by drought.

Notwithstanding the presence of
this pastiche, Nightland runs
dangerously close to some of the clichés attached to the Indian
novel. It is
perhaps the reason why Dark River is
so self-reflexive and unambiguously Signifies on Momaday, Silko,
Vizenor, etc.
– Signifyin(g) is black critic Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s name for the
trickster’s rhetoric of creative parody and critical insertion within
the
tradition. The text debates some of its own options about the images of
Indians, replacing them in the critical dialogue through the
antagonistic
voices of its characters; it breaks the frame of representation by
commenting
on itself, and even changes part of the ending, resurrecting a
character who
did not “deserve” to die. Literary erasure or cinematic retake?

Louis Owens’s hybrid narratives
about the Southwest seem to address some of the complex issues about
Native
American authenticity, communal and literary. Indian identities are
“imagined”,
in process, like all identities. Does it mean that “anything goes”?
Actually,
between the extremes of commercial Kitsch and museographic primitivism,
the
novels may be pointing to a middle ground, based on reverence for myths
and
stories (even they are not your tribe’s), intimate relation with the
land (even
if the model to describe it is Hemingway’s prose), and a reasoned
negociation
of (post)modernity. Given the fact that characters, community and
landscape are
mere marks on paper, and because of the intertextual tribute paid both
Western
literature and a whole tradition of Indian writers, it seems that,
contrary to
common representations, Native Americans have also become a “people of
the
book” in their own words, and that, through the creation of “textual
homelands”, the written word can be a help, no longer a hindrance, to
the
imagination of self and community.

‘[A]cross America
picking up ghosts’: home and the unheimliche
in Shawn Wong’s novel Homebase

Written by Chinese American Shawn
Wong, one of the four co-editors of the famous Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers (1974), a landmark book which contributed to the
emergence of Asian
American consciousness in the wider context of budding minority
activism, Homebase (1979), as its title makes
clear, addresses head-on the issue of home and belonging for
minorities. Homebase is the story of the coming of
age of Rainsford Chan, a fourth-generation Chinese American, in 1950s
and 1960s
California. The novel takes the form of a retrospective homodiegetic
narrative
as Rainsford, now 25, recalls his orphaned childhood and teenage years,
his
intensely personal memories mingling with evocations of his ancestors’
painful
experience on the American soil. The narrator, while recalling his
attempts at
becoming an all-American boy, often fuses himself with his imagined
Chinese
forebears who immigrated to the United States to build the
transcontinental
railroad and were never allowed social and cultural participation in
America.
Rainsford’s struggle against still latent ostracism unfolds against the
larger
backdrop of decades of institutionalized racism against the Chinese
American
community; the narrator tries to come to terms with both his story and
History.
And Shawn Wong, in his 2008 introduction to the University of
Washington Press
edition of the novel, indeed announces “a work of historical fiction”
meant to
“educate an audience about something called […] Chinese American
history.” (xi)
The novel is thus in a similar vein as the Preface to Aiiieeeee!
where the editors clearly affirm their political stance;
the novel unambiguously claims America as Rainsford’s – and his
community’s – homebase and thus attempts to lay the secure
foundations of
Chinese American identity.

However, this assertive standpoint seems inexorably
called into
question by the secret voice of the text. In a previous article, I have
studied
the way the dominant isotopies of movement and dispersal seem to run
counter to
the militant act of reterritorialization. I intend in this paper to
tackle
another overriding feature of the novel: its play on the uncanny, which
cannot
but sap any pretensions to solid anchorage. The unheimliche,
in
a
paradox that the German term’s etymology makes
clear, indeed seeps through the pages of Homebase,
and inscribes radical strangeness within this novel which purportedly
asserts
belonging. This first occurs on the diegetic level: not only do houses
have a
spectral quality in the novel, but a key scene ­– which stages
Rainsford
learning to speak his mother’s native language via a ventriloquist
American
puppet (a well-known trope of the unheimliche)
speaking Chinese – suggests the uncaniness of being a Chinese
American,
and several passages depict hallucinatory scenes where fantasy
contaminates
reality, the overwhelming sense of the unfamiliar forever threatening
any
striving after a secure homebase. Yet, beyond, it is the text itself
which
proves uncanny, an unsettling “house of fiction” which thus appears a
strange
locus for asserting a sense of belonging: the very narrative
configuration is
incessantly torn by temporal disruptions and shifts in perspective
which often
turn the narrative voice into an uncertain, floating entity, and the
complex
style of Shawn Wong sometimes produces opaque sentences or passages
whose
indeterminacy leaves the reader in an in-between state which is
radically
defamiliarizing.

Although the narrator aims at “picking up” the ghosts of
his
ancestors (29), he cannot lay the ghost of problematic, tortured
minority
identity to rest. The essentialist quest for identity and the discourse
of
cultural nationalism seem paralleled by an intuition of irreducible
in-betweenness. The unheimliche in Homebase
does hint at the experience of
“unhomeliness” (Homi K. Bhabha) which appears as the inescapable
condition of
the postcolonial – and more widely the “minority” – subject.

Cristina Ghiban-Mocanu, University of Iasi

Living in Nepantla:
Visions of Female Experience in the Borderlands (Ana Castillo, Sandra
Cisneros
and Norma Elia Cantu)

Chicana literature deals with the complexities of living
in the
borderlands and in-between cultures, rendered by women writers of mixed
origins
(Mexican, Indian and Western), inhabiting places they can never truly
call
their own. It is in this context that Gloria Anzaldua defines nepantla (in (Un)natural bridges, 2002)
as “tierra desconocida […] a liminal
zone” which makes one feel in a constant state of displacement.

However, it is in this spiritual realm that character
formation
takes place, and the intricate mestiza consciousness
forms as a consequence of “living in the middle”, in-between both
physical and
emotional borderlands.

The aim of the proposed paper is that of analyzing the
multiple ways
in which nepantla functions within
the literary imagery of some Chicana writers, not only as an actual
space, but
also as “a metaphor of female experience in a fragmented world”
(Kilgore, 4),
often triggering a process of reshaping feminine stereotypes, inside
and outside
the Chicano community. The analysis shall focus on the particular uses
of nepantla as a literary topos in works by
Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros and Norma Elia Cantú,
intended to
justify, to a certain extent, the multitude of creative spaces it
encompasses,
as various Chicana writers use different modes to convey its relevance.

Yves-Charles Grandjeat
(Université Bordeaux 3)

Deterritorializing and
Reterritorializing the Barrio in H. M. Viramontes’s Their
Dogs Came with Them: Fictional Ventures into the Borderlands

Helena Maria Viramontes’s 2007 novel
Their Dogs Came with Them is a barrio novel,
one in which writing is
geared to convincingly conjuring up, in the imagination of the reader,
the life
of a few blocks in the Chicano barrio of
East L.A. (the author’s place of birth), where the narrative closely
follows
the “diverging and converging” trajectories of a variety of Chicano and
Chicana
characters. Precise and frequent topographical markers endow the
narrative with
a powerful, realistic, sense of place. As ecocritics would put it, the
narrative is definitely “emplaced” and as such it belongs to a now well
established tradition of Chicano and Chicana narratives testifying to
the power
of fiction and, more specifically, story-telling in contributing to
maintain a
sense of community and a sense of territory, the two being closely
intertwined.
Because the action takes place four decades ago, at a time when the
barrio is
being gutted for construction of a major, new four-freeway
intersection, the
narrative may also qualify as “toxic fiction” and be seen as a symbolic
means
to resist modern forces of dislocation. The work of symbolic retrieval
of a
beleaguered community may be helped by the embodied quality of the
narrative as
well as by its pronounced thematic interest in rituals of social
bonding, as
some of the major characters are caught up in the world of gangs. Yet,
the
story also makes it clear that there is no going back, that the time of
origin
is a time of loss, and that bonding rituals are rituals of death. In
addition
to which, the persistent marks of a lost native tongue endow the
narrative with
a ghostly quality suggesting that much of it has been lost in
translation, and
that the only community it may produce is a ghostly one, in a ghost
town whose
phantom citizens are united by a common experience of loss. Exile in
this case
proves a condition favorable to fiction, not because it calls for
fiction that
can restore what was lost; rather, because loss becomes the creative
energy at
the heart of fiction.

Françoise Kral, Université Paris Ouest

Virtual Communities and the ‘Non-places’ of
Hypermodernity

Benedict
Anderson’s
concept
of
imagined communities continues to be an inspiration to
critics and theorists interested in the nation andon the consequences
of transnationalism.
Arjun Appadruai in particular has focused on how international ‘scapes’
transgress and transcend national borders and serve as the cornerstone
of new networks
and
communities (Appadurai, 1996). In the current context of heightened
transnationalism,
the notion of community itself poses certain questions linked to the
role,
status, and impact of such communities. It may well be the case that by
coexisting with
real communities, such recently constructed networks threaten the
existence,
the role and the longevity of existing communities. Have their newly
formed
links and their new social patterns woven in a hurry replaced actual
communities, or are they of a
completely different nature? My paper takes its cue from Marc
Augé’s reflexions
on the non-places of hypermodernity and seeks to address some of
ethical and political
implications
of such communities, through a focus on contemporary diasporic
literature from
the South Asian diaspora, in particular Kiran Desai (The
Inheritance of Loss), Hari Kunzru (Transmission)
and Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake, Unaccustomed
Earth).

Martin Kuester,
Philipps-Universität Marburg
A Minority Within a
Minority: Literary Views of ‘Marginal’ Members of the Canadian
Mennonite
Community

In my paper I will focus on Canadian Mennonite
writing, which represents a religious (and linguistic) minority to
start with.
Within this group, I will focus on the writing of individuals which are
doubly
marginalized within this already marginalized group, whether it be for
questions of gender or ethnicity: My special emphasis is going to be on
Jan
Guenther Braun’s recent lesbian Mennonite novel Somewhere
Else, which was published in 2008. In this novel, Braun
describes the tensions that arise in her character Jess who leaves her
family
as she fears she cannot survive in the stifling atmosphere of her
Mennonite
community but later learns that coming out does not preclude coming
home in the
end.

Belén Martín-Lucas, University of Vigo

(Un)becoming Laura Ingalls: Narratives of Asian
Settlement in North America

The Kappa Child (2002) has been widely acclaimed as a remarkable piece
of
speculative fiction by Japanese Canadian author Hiromi Goto. In the
USA,
Vietnamese American Bich Minh Nguyen’s memoir, Stealing
Buddah’s Dinner (2007), has similarly received much praise
and awards. Both texts portray narratives of childhood of Asian girls
growing
up in North America in the pre-multiculturalism decades of the 70s and
80s,
when “ethnic” was not a fashionable term and assimilation into
mainstream white
culture was any girl’s most wanted desire. In both literary texts, the
girl
narrators are fascinated by Laura Ingalls Wilder’s narrative of
continuous
displacement and re-settlement, Little
House on the Prairie (1935), and they both become equally
disillusioned by
the racial and ethnic gaps that make it impossible for them to become
true
Laura Ingalls in their respective environments. In this paper I will
attempt to
assess the influence of this classic narrative of (internal) migration
on the
perception of racialization of these two Asian migrants to North
America, their
own critical evaluation of the racism in Ingalls Wilder’s text and the
consequent process of construction of racialized subjectivities in
Goto’s and
Nguyen’s book.

Lianne Moyes,
Université de Montréal

Out of My Skin:
Contesting
Home
and Native Land

This paper focuses on Tessa McWatt’s Out of
My Skin (1998), a novel which engages the Oka Crisis from
the perspective of a young woman of Guyanese heritage. In 1990, the
community
of Kanehsatake north-west of Montreal resisted the attempt on the part
of the
municipality of Oka to develop their land into luxury condominiums and
a golf
course. Their resistance, which became the summer-long stand-off known
as the
Oka Crisis, brought to the fore anxious borders within
the Canadian nation and raised important questions about who
has the right (and the responsibility) to take a stand. Bringing into
conversation immigrant and First peoples’ narratives, Out
of My Skin affords alternative perspectives on this crisis as
well as on larger questions of citizenship, home, nationhood and the
role of
texts in reimagining politics.

In McWatt’s novel, the conversation begins with a chance
meeting in
a Montreal adoption agency between two young women who are looking for
information about their birth parents: one is a Mohawk woman from
Kahnewake, a
community south-west of Montreal, who grew up in a convent; the other
grew up
with adoptive parents in Toronto and has just discovered that her
mother was
from Guyana, “a country of many cultures, Chinese, African, Indian,
Portuguese,
British.” This conjunction of narratives allows McWatt’s novel to
explore
continuities and discontinuities in the respective histories, locations
and
self-constructions of immigrants and First Nations. Using techniques of
documentary collage, Out of My Skin
presents fragments from the mainstream news, Longfellow’s Hiawatha,
histories
of
Oka, and the diary of a man living in
British Guyana. Through the interplay of documents and storylines,
McWatt’s
novel makes legible different forms of, and responses to, racism and
colonial
violence.

Claire
Omhovère, Université
Monpellier 3

Pop Culture and the Construction of Ethnicity in Richard
Van Camp's The Lesser Blessed and Miriam Toews's A Complicated Kindness

For
Larry and Nomi, the protagonists of Richard Van Camp’s The
Lesser Blessed (1996) and Miriam
Toews’s A Complicated Kindness (2004),
wrestling with teenage is complicated by the issue of ethnicity and the
claims
their respective communities put on them. If you think that becoming an
adult
is tough enough, try becoming an Indian or a Mennonite in contemporary
Canada.
That is, in substance, what the two narrators are asking us. But the
way they
are telling their story, the energy and the refreshing humour they put
into it,
are well worth our attention in a context where CanLit—the CanLit which
receives national awards and international attention—is being queried
by some for
the plain boredom it inspires them: “One could say,” Douglas Coupland
writes,
“that CanLit is the literary equivalent of representational landscape
painting,
with small forays into waterfowl depiction and still lifes. It is not a
modern
art form, nor does it want to be.” (The
New York Times 2006) Modernity, however, features prominently in
the two novels
I propose to study in parallel, insofar as the strategies they resort
to point
to a shared experience of ethnicity which transcends individual
allegiances to
a given community. My analysis will concentrate on the ubiquitous
references to
pop culture which index contemporaneity in the two works, interrogating
the stereotypes
of the quaint Mennonite and the romantic Indian, two figures safely
sealed
within the amber light of the past.

Surpassing Multiculturalism: New Cosmopolitanism in
Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For

The following is a reading of Dionne Brand’s What We
All Long For
(2005) that investigates the mechanisms of identity formation in what I
would
like to characterise as the cosmopolitan context of 21st
century
Toronto. My approach relies on the deconstruction of the binary
opposition
between a white Canadian “we” and a non-white “visible” Other that is
at the
core of multicultural policy. On the one hand, the parents of the
female
protagonist, Tuyen Vu, who are first-generation immigrants, seek to
maintain their
Vietnamese traditions and accept their categorisation as
Vietnamese-Canadians
in the Canadian multicultural mosaic. Unlike them, Tuyen, an
installation
artist, decides for a life in downtown Toronto that redefines
ethnicity. Her
friends, Oku, Jackie, and Carla, also distance themselves from their
parents’
hyphenised identities and struggle with the attractive variety and
dismaying
corruption of the city, pursuing their desires and the wish to surpass
ethnic
belonging.

Virginia Ricard, Université Bordeaux 3

Ludwig Lewisohn’s Imagined Community

The now almost forgotten Jewish American writer, Ludwig Lewisohn
(1883-1955),
was a novelist, translator, critic and teacher who later became a
Jewish
nationalist. Although he was barred from the Academe by anti-semitism,
Lewisohn
was an important and respected figure on the American intellectual
scene long
before the so-called renaissance of American Jewish literature. His
work as a
drama critic for The Nation, in
particular, was influential. Lewisohn wrote three volumes of
autobiography Up Stream (1922), Mid-Channel
(1929) and Haven
(1940) in which he documents his itinerary from assimilated immigrant
to
Freudian critic to Zionist. And, in what is perhaps his best-known
novel, The Island Within (1928), Lewisohn
criticizes the very idea of assimilation: although he was brought up
with no
particular knowledge of Judaism, the hero, Arthur Levy, faced with
American
anti-semitism, looks elswhere for a sense of community and belonging
and discovers
his Jewish heritage. Ludwig
Lewisohn was that paradoxical creature, both a cosmopolitan — he spoke
French, German
and Yiddish as well as English and lived for ten years in Europe — and
a precursor
of communitarianism. I would like to examine the trope of the island —
an
imaginary space in which personal identity is developed, but also a
space of
“imagined community.”

Ada Savin,
Université de Versailles

Geographies
of
the
Caribbean inCristina Garcia’s The
Agüero Sisters (1997)

Marked by a two-fold estrangement – from her native Cuba
and from
the Cuban American community in Miami – Garcia’s first two novels, Dreaming in Cuban (1992) and The Agüero
Sisters (1997) – mirror the vagaries of a divided
Cuba, its spatial and symbolic dissemination. The omniscient narrator
delves
into the intricate and erratic links between the workings of nature and
the
drives of human actions, between the human body and the body politics,
between
home and exile. Garcia’s gaze investigates “the chemical and
irreversible”
connections between the Caribbean island and the American South
(Florida, in
particular).

I intend to show that the graft, whether literal—
botanical,
anatomic—or metaphorical—textual, cultural or linguistic— is a central
trope in
The Aguëro Sisters, functioning as a
graphic metaphorical representation of the processes of discovery,
dissemination, depletion, deconstruction and recovery explored in the
novel.

The paper further argues that Cuba’s political turmoil
and economic
disorder are mirrored in the unleashing forces of the natural elements,
in the
ravaged landscape of the human body and of the island. Conversely,
there reigns
an opulent but sterile (dis)order on the other side of the Florida
Straits.
Through the episodic reunion of family members living on different
sides of the
divide, the author brings together (“patches”) the “two Cubas”,
extending the
cultural critique to both shores, thereby calling into question the
very notion
of “authenticity”.

By examining the shifting perspectives, the contrapuntal
narrative
structure and deterritorialized (borderless) language in Garcia’s
novels, the
paper will probe the thematic and textual representations of a
“diaspora consciousness”
(James Clifford). Ultimately, Garcia’s novel seems to question the very
possibility of “at-homeness” (Adorno, Minima
Moralia), conceived in strictly territorial and cultural terms.

David Stirrup, University of Kent, Canterbury

Art, Borders, Citizenship: Containment and Flux in
selected works by Eric Gansworth and Thomas King

“…I leave the
air-conditioned building and head out into the west Texas sun, and the
fact
that I can now slide my license back in my wallet, and become someone I
am
not—a citizen of New York State, and thus, a citizen of the United
States of
America, as well—is no great comfort.” (Eric Gansworth, ‘Identification
Pleas’)

This paper will consider questions of cultural/historical
reclamation, nationhood, and citizenship in, and in relation to,
selected
poetry and prose by Onondaga artist and author Eric Gansworth and
Thomas King’s
novel Truth & Bright Water.
Focusing particularly on the role of art and the artist this paper will
examine
the traversal of borders and boundaries—both real and apparent, hard
and
‘fluid’—between image and text, mythic and ‘real’, between individuals,
and
individuals and communities, and between nations. Probing the way both
writers
use art and the figure of the artist/art critic to examine an array of
cultural
assumptions, the elision of Native peoples from the national
‘landscape’, and
the specific territorial, or ‘landed’ concerns of indigenous
sovereignty, I
will argue that both writers are engaged in the redefining of the
arbitrary
national border in favour of more complex, nuanced, and above all
self-defining
notions of citizenship. In parallel to this textual analysis, then, I
will also
look at King’s decision to leave the United States and take up Canadian
citizenship, alongside Gansworth’s eschewal of US citizenship and his
refusal
to obtain a passport on the grounds that that in itself would deny him
his
status as citizen of the Onondaga Nation of the Haudenosaunee
Confederacy.
These personal matters of belonging are intricately tied up in the
broader
cultural and political questions their work raises, and in their own
roles as
indigenous writers/artists in the USA and Canada.